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It’s always the same dream.
We’re on earth again, only two of us, and we’re heroes. Crowds of people cheer at an appearance in Golden Gate Park. Admirals tell us we are model officers. Even dreaming, I see the humor in that. A father in a Starfleet uniform holds a little, red-haired girl on his shoulders, and she reaches out with paper and pen, to ask for my autograph.
Time floats backwards. Confetti billows above my head in the light from the new, improved warp core. Kathryn is next to me, as always, speaking of hope and home. I have rarely seen her this happy, and I could get used to it. I hope that soon, very soon, I will have the chance to get used to it, and that hope is reinforced when she invites me to dinner in her quarters.
But suddenly she’s not there anymore.
The crew and the crowd in the park meld together, thousands of faces I don’t know. I look and look for her, searching out her hair among all these strangers, but she is nowhere.
Admiral Paris says to me: “You are very lucky men, you know.” I laugh in his face, a cold, hard laugh I thought I had left behind in the DMZ.
And then I hear her, from somewhere above, before, behind, within me. “Are you with me?”
“Always,” I say.
I wake suddenly, with tears on my cheeks. I listen for Tessa’s breathing, hoping I haven’t woken her, too. But Tessa’s not here.
Right. Delta Flyer. Pillows and thermal blankets on the floor because there are no crew quarters. Right.
I brush the tears away. It’s been a long time since the dream has made me cry—twelve, thirteen years, I don’t know.
Tessa’s voice comes over the comm system. It calms me. Tessa always calms me. “Chakotay? We’re almost there.”
“I’ll be right up,” I say, already pulling myself off the floor.
Tom Paris’s favorite toy is so small I can feel the space passing by beneath me.
Paris. Jesus. I recall, again, that Tom was the first to realize we had a problem with the new quantum slipstream drive. And I recall seeing him out of the corner of my eye, at that celebration I always dream of; he was, Harry later told me, running a warp core diagnostic while the rest of us were busy with fantasies of homecoming.
I reach for my shoes but realize I fell asleep with them on. Sighing, I head for the bridge.
I must be even more tired than I know, because the dream still haunts me, awake. I’d been having it less and less over the years, but the closer we get to my past the more the images fill my head. Crowds, and confetti. Gretchen Janeway shaking my hand. B’Elanna christening the warp core. Candles in Kathryn’s quarters. Her hand on my cheek. Her cooking—she cooked for me. Kathryn never cooked for anyone. It wasn’t half bad, either.
“Are you with me?”
“Always.”
She cooked for me, and then she left me with a promise she could never keep.
“Too long,” she said, “we’ve waited too long.” We both knew she wasn’t only talking about our mission. I read the words in her eyes: “We’ve waited too long, Chakotay.”
A promise. Part of me wishes she’d never made it, but part of me knows that it gave me the peace I needed to go on without her. It let me put her in the past, where, in all honesty, she belongs. Where they all belong.
I’ve said that to Harry—of course I’ve said that to Harry. They belong in the past, we have no right to change that.
But there’s never much conviction in my voice when I say it.
On the bridge, the viewscreen displays our approach to an L-class planet. The L-class planet. It’s white and it’s blinding.
“How far?” I ask Tessa. She’s at ops, Harry is at the helm.
“19,000 kilometers.”
“I’m just entering orbit,” Harry says, and I can feel the ship turning.
“You get any sleep?” Tessa asks me quietly.
“Out like a rock.”
Her smile is a small one, and she turns back to the controls. If we were alone, she’d ask me what I dreamed about, though she can recite it as well as I can.
“I’ll take that now, Harry,” I say, walking towards him.
He looks up at me, stands, moves silently to secondary ops. He has readings to study, and no time for pleasantries. It’s so hard for me to remember the young man he once was, the idealist, the innocent on the bridge. He has almost as much gray in his hair as I do, now.
I’ve gone on with my life. I have regrets, of course, but who doesn’t? I have Tessa. I have a good job, or did, until I took an indefinite leave of absence to return to living outside the law. I teach Native American cultural history and archaeology at the new tribal college on Dorvan V; there’s plenty of money to go around on Dorvan, ever since it and a dozen other border colonies were returned to Federation space nearly fourteen years ago. I have no qualms about benefiting from that before the Federation Council change their minds again. Teaching is more fulfilling than Starfleet ever was. It goes without saying that it’s more fulfilling than the Maquis were.
This timeline has treated me well.
But Harry…Harry has nothing but the doubts and the anger that have followed him for fifteen years. Harry hasn’t let himself live for even one day since we got back.
At the helm, I force myself to confront the icy glare before us. Is this it? Has this been their resting place for the last fifteen years? Did they die immediately—or did they slowly freeze, or starve, and give in to death one by one? Did they have a chance to say goodbye to those they loved, Tom and B’Elanna, Ensigns Holtz and Drevarik, Jenny and Megan, Sam and Naomi, any of them?
“I’m reading ice. A hell of a lot of ice,” Harry says. It could be a joke if any of us felt like laughing.
“I’ve got something that could be a dilithium residue,” Tessa says. “In the northern hemisphere.”
I hear Harry working the controls, calling up Tessa’s readings. He grunts. And that’s the moment I know: This is it. This is real.
“Titanium,” Harry says. “Not a lot of carbon, but a concentration of it right near the dilithium.” He reads off some coordinates and I adjust the helm controls.
“There’s definitely something organic under the surface,” Tessa says. “A few meters down. Here.”
The viewscreen zooms in on one glacier. I think I can detect a darker object inside, but it’s probably my imagination.
“Life signs?” I ask, automatically, even though I know I won’t get the answer I’m praying for.
Silence. Then Tessa says quietly, “A wide variety of microbial life forms, most of them in the ice. Nothing else.”
Microbes living in the ice pretty much says it all, I think. I wonder again what will greet us, inside the hull.
“Bingo,” Harry says. “I think I’ve found Seven.”
“You think?”
“I won’t be sure until we get down there.”
Neither of us is particularly looking forward to this homecoming. We pretend, for a few moments, that we have all the time in the universe.
“Then you’d better get down there,” Tessa says finally.
“Right,” I say, standing. “Let’s go.”
Harry looks from me to Tessa and back again. “I’ll go suit up.” Then he leaves us alone.
“Good luck,” Tessa says. Her eyes are bright. She’s happy—happy to be giving me this, to be helping Harry, to be this close to our goal. I love seeing her happy. I love her. But she…it’s not the same for her.
Tessa loves me the way I loved Kathryn.
This was quite a revelation, when I managed to put it in those words. We’d been together for less than two years then, and we’d gone to visit the Diné lands where I’d lived with my mother when I was very small. Towards the end of the trip, we climbed to the top of one of the old Hopi mesas—Third Mesa, which has been uninhabited since the late twenty-second century. I knew the way, so I went first, and when I turned to make sure she was all right, I caught her watching me with an expression that was far too familiar. Kathryn used to stop dead when she saw me do that; I’d learned to cover it up, most of the time.
I stared at Tessa until she laughed nervously and said, “What?” I told her it was nothing and handed her a water bottle, watched her tilt it up and drink, greedily. I was more used to the dry air than she was.
We climbed the rest of the way together. Later, in our camp in the canyon far below, I made very, very sure it would be a night she would never forget.
Tessa loves me the way I loved Kathryn, and she believes that my happiness lies frozen fifteen years in the past. So she’ll let me go. She’ll give up everything—her life, her career, her freedom, us, everything.
I’m not that selfless. I do love her. I love her very much. But it’s not that blinding, all- encompassing love I had for Kathryn. It’s quieter, maybe less self-destructive, definitely more grounded. Maybe—I wonder—maybe more like the love Kathryn had for me. I’d like to think that, though I realize that that, too, is selfish.
But then, this entire mission is selfish.
I take Tessa’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” she says, with that same look on her face. She’s no longer shy about it; we have very few secrets left.
I told Kathryn, that last night, that any engineer would say we were insane for attempting the slipstream flight. But I don’t need an engineer to tell me I’m insane to give up the best relationship I’ve ever had for one that always existed mainly in my head.
“I love you,” I tell Tessa.
“I know.” And she smiles.
I see her again on the mesa, spreading her arms to welcome the sun, shading her eyes to watch a hawk glide overhead. I see her walking among the crumbling houses as if she were in prayer, and reaching for my hand with tears in her eyes. I see a night I thought I would never forget.
But as I leave the bridge, to get my thermal suit, it’s Kathryn’s voice I hear.
“Are you with me?”
“Always.”
Crowds, and confetti. Two glasses of wine. Kathryn’s eyes begging me to understand the words she wasn’t saying.
In a few hours, if all goes as we plan, I’ll be with her again. On Voyager. Fifteen years of my life erased.
If all goes as we plan, I’ll never even know what I’ve lost.
Or what I’ve stolen.